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ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT AT 
THE UNVEILING OF THE MONU- 
MENT TO GENERAL SHERJDAN ^ 
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1908 



>J» 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1908 



•-<•*/ L 



ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT AT 
THE UNVEtt^ING OF THE MONU- 
MENT TO GENERAL SHERJDAN ^ 
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25. 1908 



^ 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1908 






DEC 15 1908 



•C 15 1! 

a or a 



It is eminently fitting that the Na- 
tion's illustrious men, the men who 
loom as heroes before the eyes of our 
people, should be fittingly commem- 
orated here at the National Capital, and 
I am glad indeed to take part in the 
unxeiling of this statue to General 
Sheridan. His name will always stand 
high on the list of American worthies. 



2 

Not only was he a great general, but he 
showed his greatness with that touch of 
originality which we call genius. Indeed 
this quality of brilliance has been in one 
sense a disadvantage to his reputation, for 
it has tended to overshadow his solid 
ability. We tend to think of him only as 
the dashing cavalry leader, whereas he 
was in reality not only that, but also a 
great commander. Of course, the fact in 
his career most readily recognized was his 
mastery in the necessarily modern art of 



3 

handling masses of modern cavalry so as 

to give them the fullest possible effect, 
not only in the ordinary operations of 
cavalry which precede and follow a battle, 
but in the battle itself. But in addition he 
showed in the civil war that he was a 
first-class army commander, both as a 
subordinate of Grant and when in inde- 
pendent command. His record in the 
Valley campaign, and again from Five 
Forks to Appomattox, is one difficult to 
parallel in military history. After the close 



4 

of the great war, in a field where there was 

scant glory to be won by the general in 
chief, he rendered a signal service which has 
gone almost unnoticed; for in the tedious 
weary Indian wars on the Great Plains 
it was he who developed in thorough- 
going fashion the system of campaigning 
in winter, which, at the cost of bitter 
hardship and peril, finally broke down 
the banded strength of those formidable 
warriors, the horse Indians. 

His career was typically American, for 



5 

from plain beginnings he rose to the 

highest military position in our land. 
We honor his memory itself; and more- 
over, as in the case of the other great 
commanders of his day, his career sym- 
bolizes the careers of all those men who 
in the years of the nation's direst need 
sprang to the front to risk everything, 
including life itself, and to spend the days 
of their strongest young manhood in 
valorous conflict for an ideal. Often we 
Americans are taunted with having only 



6 

a material ideal. The empty folly of the 

taunt is sufficiently shown by the presence 
here to-day of you men of the Grand 
Army, you the comrades of the dead 
general, the men who served with and 
under him. In all history we have no 
greater instance of subordination of self, 
of the exalting of a lofty ideal over 
merely material well-being among the 
people of a great nation, than was shown 
by our own people in the civil war. 

And you, the men who wore the blue, 



7 

would be the first to say that this same 
lofty indifference to the things of the body, 
when compared to the things of the soul, 
was shown by your brothers who wore the 
gray. Dreadful was the suffering, dread- 
ful the loss, of the civil war. Yet it 
stands alone among wars in this, that, now 
that the wounds are healed, the memory 
of the mighty deeds of valor performed 
on one side no less than on the other has 
become the common heritage of all our 
people in every quarter of this country. 



8 

The completeness with which this is true 

is shown by what is occurring here to-day. 
We meet together to raise a monument 
to a great Union general, in the presence 
of many of the survivors of the Union 
Army; and the Secretary of War, the man 
at the head of the Army, who, by virtue 
of his office, occupies a special relation to 
the celebration, is himself a man who 
fought in the Confederate service. Few 
indeed have been the countries where such 
a conjunction would have been possible, 



9 

and blessed indeed are we that in our own 

beloved land it is not only possible, but 
seems so entirely natural as to excite no 
comment whatever. 

There is another point in General 
Sheridan's career which it is good for 
all of us to remember. Whereas Grant, 
Sherman, and Thomas were of the old 
native American stock, the parents of 
Sheridan, like the parents of Farragut, 
were born on the other side of the water. 
Any one of the five was just as much a 



lO 

type of the real American, of what is best 
in America, as the other four. We should 
keep steadily before our minds the fact 
that Americanism is a question of prin- 
ciple, of purpose, of idealism, of character; 
that it is not a matter of birthplace, or 
creed, or line of descent. Here in this 
country the representatives of many old- 
world races are being fused together into 
a new type, a type the main features of 
which are already determined, and were 
determined at the time of the Revolutionary 



II 

war; for the crucible in which all the new 

types are melted into one was shaped 
from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality 
was definitely fixed in all its essentials 
by the men of Washington's day. The 
strains will not continue to exist sepa- 
rately in this country as in the old world. 
They will be combined in one; and of 
this new type those men will best repre- 
sent what is loftiest in the nation's past, 
what is finest in her hope for the future, 
who stand each solely on his worth as 



12 

a man; who scorn to do evil to others, 
and who refuse to submit to wrongdoing 
themselves; who have in them no taint 
of weakness; who never fear to fight 
when fighting is demanded by a sound 
and high morality, but who hope by 
their lives to bring ever nearer the day 
when justice and peace shall prevail within 
our own borders and in our relations 
with all foreign powers. 

Much of the usefulness of any career 
must lie in the impress that it makes 



13 

upon, and the lessons that it teaches to, 

the ofenerations that come after. We of 



t> 



this generation have our own problems 
to solve, and the condition of our solving 
them is that we shall all work together as 
American citizens without regard to dif- 
ferences ot section or creed or birthplace, 
copying, not the divisions which so 
lamentably sundered our fathers one from 
another, but the s])irit of burning devo- 
tion to duty which drove them forward, 
each to do the right as it was given him 



to see the right, in the great years when 
Grant, Farragut, Sherman, Thomas, and 
Sheridan, when Lee and Jackson, and the 
Johnstons, the valiant men of the North 
and the valiant men of the South, fought 
to a finish the great civil war. 
They did not themselves realize, in the 
bitterness of the struggle, that the blood 
and the grim suffering marked the death 
throes of what was worn out, and the birth 
pangs of a new and more glorious national 
life. Mighty is the heritage which we 



15 

have received from the men of the mighty 

days. We, in our turn, must gird up our 
loins to meet the new issues with the same 
stern courage and resolute adherence to 
an ideal, which marked our fathers who 
belonged to the generation of the man in 
whose honor we commemorate this monu- 
ment to-day. 



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